![]() ![]() The light show, the big-name band, and the hippie ambience faded before that smell, unchanged since the days when the student council hung a few million paper snowflakes from the ceiling and tried to pass it off as Winter Wonderland. Robertson Gym stank like every gym in history. With a final “oh, fuck it, man,” they trouped up to the stage through the massed groupies. Phil shook him to his feet and asked if there was anything he could do, but Bear’s pale eyes were as sightless as fog. When the band got to the gym, he was flat on his back, curled up among the drum cases. The Bear, who handles the sound system as well as the chemicals, was out of it anyway. Trump’s White House Was ‘Awash in Speed’ - and Xanax “It’s good enough for Lee Michaels, it’s good enough for you,” he said, and they were too tired to fight it. ![]() The promoter, a slick Hollywood type, had told them at five in the afternoon that he wouldn’t let them set up their own PA. Phil drove one, and since he didn’t have his license and had six stoned back seat drivers for company, he had gotten pretty paranoid. So they had hustled over to National Rent-a-Car, gotten two matched Pontiacs and driven the 350 miles down the coast. The travel agent had given them the wrong flight time and, being the day before the Memorial Day weekend, there was no space on any other flight for all fourteen of them. His good humor was enormous, even though it had been a bitch of a day. If you reject one, you’re not getting the whole thing that’s there to be had. What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. “They exist together in their little game, each with its special place and special humors. “See, it’s like good and evil,” Jerry went on, his yellow glasses glinting above his eager smile. ![]() “My pleasure, we’ll take you as low and mean as you want to go.” “Sure, I’ll fuck up for an audience,” said Mickey from behind his sardonic beard, bowing. After about twenty minutes they decided to call it quits, ended with a long building crescendo, topping that with a belching cannon blast (which fell right on the beat, the only luck they found that night), and split the stage.ġ00 Greatest Guitarists of All Time: Jerry Garcia For the briefest of seconds a nice phrase would pop out, and the crowd would cheer, thinking maybe this was it, but before the cheer died, the moment had also perished. Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman, the drummers, couldn’t find anything to settle on, and the others kept trying ways out of the mess, only to create new tangles of bumpy rhythms and dislocated melodies. Stephen,” they fell into “Lovelight” as a last resort, putting Pigpen out in front to lay on his special brand of oily rag pig-ism while they funked around behind. After abortive stabs at “Doing That Rag” and “St. Maybe they were too stoned on one of the Bear’s custom-brewed elixirs, or the long meeting that afternoon with the usual fights about salaries and debt priorities and travel plans for the upcoming tour that they’d be making without a road manager, and all the work of being, in the end, a rock and roll band, may have left them pissed off. The Dead were glad to do it, but it was one more benefit to bail out the politicos. Or they might have been cynical – a benefit for those Berkeley dudes who finally learned what a park is but are still hung up on confrontation and cops and bricks and spokesmen giving TV interviews and all that bullshit. ![]() Maybe they were a bit tired of being taken for granted as surefire deliverers of good vibes – drained by constant expectations. They led off with a warm-up tune that they did neatly enough, and the crowd, swarmed in luminescent darkness, sent up “good old Grateful Dead, we’re so glad you’re here,” vibrations. ![]()
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